It's okay to not be okay (or: freeing yourself from the false "power of positivity")

Throughout the world and in America, great value is placed on happiness. The goal is to be happy, to be free of limiting, “negative” habits and perspectives, and to unlock the freedom that joy and positivity have to offer.

This is a common sentiment expressed everywhere from ads for household cleaning products to politics. Do this, buy that, vote for him, and you, too, can be happy, fulfilled, and free like the people on TV (who are actually probably miserable in their real lives!).

This powerful belief was brought about in part by America’s first modern propagandist, Edward Bernays, who brilliantly helped shift marketing tactics from selling products based on utility and need to selling them based on emotion — asserting instead that the consumer would be happier if they had it. Unsurprisingly, Bernays worked extensively with politicians.

Politicians, too, appeal to emotions, and while this emotion is often fear, they tend to insert themselves as a remedy to that fear and to the problems that — in stirring fear — deprive the people of their happiness. How can one be happy if they’re terrified of radical Islam or anti-government extremists or the collapse of social security or Western values?

Numbing our discomfort

Despite the many options allegedly available to us to be happy, rates of anxiety, depression, suicide, and mood-altering pharmaceutical drugs are on the rise.

Regardless of the source of discomfort — and despite infinite options for people to runaway from that discomfort — unhappiness and dissatisfaction continue to plague Americans and the world. Are you depressed? There’s a pill for that! Anxious? A different pill for that. Both? POP ALL THE PILLS!

These state-sanctioned substances, along with many others, are easy, false fixes to deeper suffering (*despite my personal opposition to such treatments, I do want to clarify that in some cases, people who are struggling can gain immediate relief from them; everyone is different, and I think absolute endorsements or condemnations can be dangerous).

Alcohol, heroin, and even cannabis are used as crutches to avoid feeling our pain. We sedate ourselves with co-dependent relationships, food, television, and politicians to find immediate relief and distractions from our distress. There is always a way to escape, even if that escape is zoning out into a cacophony of neurotic thoughts, removing ourselves from the feelings in our hearts to dive deep into our more intellectual minds.

I’ll be real with you

I say this all of from experience. Though I never took mood-altering pharmaceutical drugs (aside from dabbling in Xanax a few times one summer after college), I did nearly everything else to avoid feeling the discomfort of pain and childhood trauma.

For years in college and after, I compulsively smoked weed, I went out clubbing in Hollywood, downing plastic-bottled vodka to avoid feeling my feelings, I retreated into my thoughts, I raged against Republicans (and then, after breaking free of statism, raged against both Republicans and Democrats and the government in general). Of course, I didn’t realize that that’s what I was doing, but these were all effective ways to disconnect and run away.

Then I found yoga, and suddenly everything changed. I focused on my breath, I connected with my body, and I walked out of vinyasa classes in Santa Monica feeling my own energy buzzing and the weight of years of childhood fear, confusion, and sadness cracking open and falling away from my heart. I was free!

Until I wasn’t. As much as I love yoga (I love it so much I became a certified teacher after a year of practicing and consider it my second passion after my activism), that wasn’t the solution. So I tried meditation! Surely, meditating every day was the answer. It helped for a while, but somehow the pesky emotional pain I couldn’t bear to acknowledge kept creeping its way back into my consciousness. And I kept running, despite my best efforts to heal. Energy healer? Tried it! Acupuncture? Changed my life (for a few weeks)! Essential oils in a diffuser for anxiety?! Worked for a day. Crystals? Still have them placed delicately around my apartment...but they didn’t alleviate my pain.

Bypassing true healing with false refuge

I recently learned about the practice of “spiritual bypassing,” whereby one buries themselves in spiritual exercises (like yoga or meditation or energy work) to unconsciously engage in further repression of their deeper wounds. It amounts to an obsessive and compulsive need to feel fine all the time. “Be careful of your thoughts — what you think you become!” is a popular sentiment. So is “Let go of the past!”

According to one explanation by teacher and author Augustus Masters:

“Aspects of spiritual bypassing include exaggerated
detachment, emotional numbing and repression, overemphasis on the positive,
anger-phobia, blind or overly tolerant compassion, weak or too porous
boundaries, lopsided development (cognitive intelligence often being far ahead
of emotional and moral intelligence), debilitating judgment about one’s
negativity or shadow side, devaluation of the personal relative to the
spiritual, and delusions of having arrived at a higher level of being.”

Under this mindset, the power of positivity can set you free and manifest happiness! Positive affirmations can change your life!

In addition to being a way to avoid dealing with our deeper struggles and emotions, strategies like these can actually drive us deeper into suffering. What happens if you repeat positive affirmations to yourself about self-worth and love and compassion but you grew up in a difficult family situation where your core wounds were feeling unloved or unworthy? What if your parents weren’t able to give you compassion for this pain (in all likelihood because of pain they endured in their childhood passed down from their parents and so on and so forth)? There’s a good chance repeating those affirmations and not being able to truly believe them due to deep your wounds will only exacerbate the pain. What’s wrong with me? Why aren’t they working?! I’m defective!

None of this is to say meditation and yoga and crystals and energy healing and trying to be positive are bad or a waste of them. They’re all wonderful things. I’ve tried them all and still enjoy them. Yoga and meditation are integral parts of my life, and I’d be far more frazzled and stressed without them.

But the truth — or at least my truth — is that there is no quick fix. In fact, if anything, yoga and meditation are effective tools to calm the mind, which then allows the pain of the heart to surface even more readily.

Again, I speak from experience, and in my life, the greatest suffering I endured was indisputably the pain of childhood trauma, but it was equally the pain of running away from that trauma. As meditation teacher and psychologist Tara Brach says in one of her heart-opening guided meditations, “Part of what keeps us from realness – in that small self identity – is the avoiding of what’s here.”

In my unconscious avoidance of acknowledging and feeling my feelings of fear, confusion, and not feeling loved, I compulsively, habitually found myself in situations, relationships, and addictive states that, while repressing the deeper wounds for a time, only hurt me more and amplified what I was running away from while avoiding the reality of my deeper suffering. That suffering was calling out to be acknowledged and cared for, but I simply couldn’t face it.

It’s okay to not be okay!

All of this is simply to say that it’s okay to not be okay. It’s okay to not be happy all the time and to not feel like an ad for Pfizer’s newest antidepressant. In fact (again, in my experience and the experiences of many around me who have also struggled), not being okay and accepting and sitting with that deep discomfort is the first step toward being okay.

The longer and faster we run and the more we seek out external fixes — whether politicians, mindless television, hypnotherapy, kundalini yoga, hard drugs, or CBD oil (to be fair, I had a good run with that, and I do believe it is a true medicine for many things) — the more our pain will cry out to us to be heard, and the more we will crave and find ways to ignore it.

This isn’t to say that we should simply wallow in our feelings and surrender to depression and anxiety. I did that for years despite my best efforts to escape it (despite the amazing energy healing sessions I did with a lovely lady in Venice, and despite hours upon hours of yoga and grams upon grams of high-quality CBD oil). It is to suggest that rather than avoiding our feelings and trying to numb them (which we usually don’t even realize we’re doing), perhaps it is possible to feel them in a compassionate way.

It isn’t easy, and for me, it will be a lifelong process. Despite having spent over a year learning to practice this through deep journeys to access my inner children (they’re all different ages and all have different wounds, and I admittedly sometimes feel schizophrenic as I sit quietly trying to tend to and comfort them all!), this is a day-to-day, moment-to-moment practice.

I am not always happy. I am not always secure. I am not always conscious of how my childhood conditioning affects my reactions and moods and choices. But what I have learned and truly felt in my heart is the power of letting that pain simply be, recognizing it, and letting it know it is not only seen, but understandable.

In a nutshell, for me, I often work with pain caused from the following core events: My parents got divorced (after years of an unhappy marriage) and three of my grandparents and my dog died in a span of four years between the ages of 8 and 12. I was confused, shaken, scared, angry, and felt completely alone.

Instead of telling myself to get over it and let it go and think more positively, I’ve learned to remind myself that my emotional reactions (and the conditioned behaviors to avoid feeling those difficult emotions) make perfect sense! What else could I have felt as a child enduring such difficult and unstable circumstances?

By finding the wiser, higher self in me and by allowing ‘her’ to comfort the wounded parts of me, I am learning (and always will be) how to be there for myself and how to be a container for the pain I carry around like so many others. I feel that pain in my heart, and it usually feels like a gripping or clamping down when I really tap into emotional memories of my experiences. Yet when I allow them to be there instead of retreating to my mind and other distractions, they soften.

Stressful things still happen in my life, I still feel hurt by the actions of others, and I still feel the suffering I didn’t know how to feel or process when I was a young child.

But by letting all this pain be there and reminding myself that of course it was/is (what else could I have felt/could I feel?!), my heart opens a little more each time.

The less I resist, the more I am able to truly build compassion for myself (and others), and the more my heart opens and sets itself free. Everyone’s path is different, but as I look at the world and so many suffering people in it, it’s clear to me that we are all in need of true healing — not quick fixes that only deepen our trauma’s need to be heard.

If this is a process that sounds interesting to you, here are some resources to check out:
https://www.tarabrach.com/
http://mbct.com/
http://www.humanisticspirituality.org/?page=search&search_all=true&topic=guided%20meditations

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